Dr. Rinke’s main interests are genomics, ecology, and phylogeny of uncultured microbes. He applies single-cell genomics, the separation and sequencing of single bacterial and archaeal cells, and metagenomics, the direct sequencing of environmental samples, to explore microbial dark matter.
This project aims to investigate the highly controversial origin of eukaryotes and thus all multicellular life within Archaea, a domain of single-celled microorganisms.